Box office watchers will be familiar with the phrase “biggest ever”, which seems to crop up a couple of times a month when the performance of the latest blockbuster is trumpeted: “Biggest ever Thursday in October!” “Biggest ever non-holiday weekend opening for a non-sequel!”

When the hype and the hyperbole die down, however, there are clear winners and losers in the global box office charts – but what are the horror genre’s biggest box office hits of all time?

Some caveats: Ghostbusters, Scary Movie and Shutter Island would have scored pretty big, if we classified those as horror movies, as BoxOfficeMojo.com does.

Of course, dollar grosses only tell part of the story – after all, 441 million 1973 dollars (The Exorcist) would be worth a lot more than 585 million 2007 dollars (I Am Legend). We haven’t adjusted for inflation, but… we did manage to count U.S. ticket sales for the biggest horror films of all time (again, with the help of BoxOfficeMojo.com), and here’s what that chart looks like:

So what do you think? Were we fools to exclude Ghostbusters, Scary Movie and Shutter Island? Were we crazy to call The Mummy, The Mummy Returns and The Silence of the Lambs horror movies?